ABSTRACT
Between 1999 and 2002 the Internet became embedded in British society and British children acquired knowledge of the Internet, at home and at school, just as they learnt about other things, often without any sense of its ‘newness’. In one important way, however, ICT frequently offered children a new kind of social power since, as with an earlier generation during the 1980s, many adults regarded children's ease of use of ICT with admiration and deferred to their knowledge. In homes, during this later period, increasing numbers of children and adolescents were given access to powerful computers with Internet access, often for extended periods of time and sometimes for their exclusive use. The Internet quickly rivalled television as the favourite media by which young people of all ages immersed themselves in popular culture within their homes, moving back and forth between family culture and youth culture in an integrated ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ environment in the family living room or their bedroom. Some of these young people are now using their computer for a kind of multi-tasking activity quite unlike anything known to pre-Internet generations, for example, simultaneously researching a topic and producing a word-and-image-processed text about it for homework, while chatting to friends using an IRC (Internet relay chat) system such as MSN messaging, listening to downloaded music and every now and then ‘minimizing’ their homework to take a few minutes relaxation with a computer game (either on CD-ROM or online).
